malists who cabled concurrence with the British statement; it was with their leaders that they had old associations. But, in common with the workers of all Europe, the British were greatly stirred by the Russian revolutions, and they ascribed in no small part to the Allies themselves (in failing to meet the Russian provisional government half way in the matter of war aims, and in blocking the Stockholm meetings) the overthrow of Kerensky, the cave-in of the Russian armies, and all that those events came to mean. And they believed an outcome on the eastern front altogether different from the subsequent Brest-Litovsk treaties was possible if the same attitude were not persisted in toward the Soviets.

They were not, in fine, anything that the jingo press described them to be in the earlier stages of the movement, and they were not concerned with what it ascribed to them now, except as this afforded powder to their agitation and further identified the contrary policy with those very forces with which, for twenty years past, the British labor movement had wrestled in forcing through domestic industrial and political reforms. Their positions, here sketched in broad outline, were, of course, not altogether different from those held painfully by individual thinkers and small groups in each of the warring countries, individuals and groups that were currently damned for their pains, and that lacked both the mass and momentum to get their proposals across to the general public. But here, shouldering their way up into the arena not only of discussion but of decision, came a body of men who refused, quite as doggedly as the lonelier prophets, to be dislodged by conventional blasts of denunciation and whom the very winds of controversy served only to reveal as a rapidly mustering host.

That this new leadership in western Europe would spring from the labor movement might have been foreseen.

With hold-over parliaments, more or less out of touch with the changes in public opinion, and with coalition governments, shortcircuiting the development of party sentiment as such, the policies of the older party groups failed to crystallize while the war was on in a way clearly to differentiate them. Thus, the British Labour Party found its opportunity; the elimination of its secretary, Arthur Henderson, from the British War Council by way of the "doormat" on August 11, 1917, being the occasion for its action but not its cause. Within the succeeding twelve months it slowly formulated a coherent program, both of foreign and internal policy, which could be weighed against that of the government in power and which offered an alternative, fresher approach to issues of war and peace; a program which on its international side could be taken over by kindred groups in the Allied nations who

had been groping for such leadership, and which had the tremendous reinforcement of being, seemingly, more in line with the free statesmanship of the American president than the course their own governments were able or chose to follow.

That it should be in England that this new labor leadership would emerge might equally well have been forecast. Elsewhere, the groupings had been too fragmentary; the cleavages between extremes. In France and Germany, the socialists had been split by the war. The minority factions had taken a position of opposition to their governments but that had been not only on matters of policy, but on the prosecution of the war itself. In Italy, it had been the majority, but the working classes in the Italian cities had not as yet found common cause with the peasants; the proletariat was immature. In France the syndicalists presented a separate wing of the labor movement, discounting both the parliamentary groups of socialists. Since the fall of 1917, Italy, like France, had been invaded, and the psychology of the situation had been against any organized action which might be construed as counter to the prime duty of getting the invaders out. In undefeated, uninvaded England, the labor movement was freer to assert itself along lines more nearly analogous to those possible in peace times; and it did so.

Moreover, the British Labour Party was made up largely of men who had been "for the war" and who were indispensable to it; who had the disconcerting effrontery to lay down with one hand plans for a great memorial in London to their fellows who had fallen in the conflict, and with the other to set going the nominating machinery for contesting not only the 35 seats they then held in Parliament, but some 300 more.

The Miners' Federation of Great Britain, for example, with four hundred thousand unionists in the British forces, could not lightly be discounted as "slackers." Nor could the Labour Party be set aside as negligible, with its 2,700,000 members, in the overt act of stretching their tent ropes to include all workers "by hand or by brain," with testimony of social unrest drawn by government inquiries from every part of the kingdom,-and with fair prospect that the troops when demobilized would strike hands with them.

So it was that after a Russian government had gone down with its plea for a fresh statement of war aims unmet; after the Russian soviet program had for two months gone unanswered; 1

'The All Russian Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates enumerated 15 points in the form of instructions to its delegate to the Allied War Conference, Paris; the Bolsheviki took over the government and organized a council of National Commissioners on November 7, 1917, in whose name Leon Trotsky, as national commissioner for foreign affairs, sent out the document of 15 points as a "formal offer of an immediate

after a certain noble peer had been soundly scolded as a pacifist Tory for writing a piece to the papers; after President Wilson's earlier declarations had been met with altogether vague if hearty assents; after the U. D. C. leaders and, at their side, a score of like-minded commoners who had never broken silence before, had been denounced by spokesmen for the Cabinet for raising afresh the issue of war aims at Westminster; after all these things, a delegate conference of the British Trades Union Congress (the industrial organization of British labor) and the Labour Party (the political organization of British labor) came forward with their joint statement of war aims on December 28, 1917, and smoked the administration out. A carefully prepared statement was given out by the premier at a conference with labor on the man power bill on January 5, 1918. There followed President Wilson's world-encircling message of fourteen points which the English labor leaders hailed as kindred to their own; and which the French parliamentarians, in a remarkable session of the Chamber, claimed as breathing the very spirit of France, marred only by the consciousness that their own government had not given it utterance first. Whatever considerations inside the British War Cabinet, and whatever commitments to the Allies outside, had inhibited Lloyd George from coming forward earlier, no longer held after labor's show of hands. Rightly or wrongly, the labor group felt that they were the only force strong enough to have opened the way for his statement; the only force strong enough in the future to bring the British government into line on those crucial points of President Wilson's statement, and of their own, where the British official statement was silent; where France and Italy had not spoken.

America entered the new year (1918) with its full weight thrown in the inter-Allied war councils for that unified command of the armies on the western front which in Foch's hands, and supported by fresh and ever fresher divisions from over seas, was armistice on all fronts and the immediate opening of peace negotiations;" followed by an invitation of Dec. 6, to all embassies and legations to participate and by the issuance by the Russian plenipotentiaries of six 'basic principles" at Brest-Litovsk, Dec. 22. Count Czernin's six clauses of December 25 were in reply to these Russian formulations; and Lloyd George in the course of his statement of January 5 and President Wilson in the course of his message of January 8 made rejoinder to Count Czernin. Clearly the Allied governments felt the obligation of making a counter statement of war aims at a time they were holding aloof from the Brest-Litovsk meetings. The initiative of the Bolsheviki as well as the pressure of British labor was a factor in the new public declarations. This series of documents was published in "A League of Nations" by the World Peace Foundation, Boston, 1918

to throw back in defeat Hindenburg's supreme effort to break through. It entered the new year with the President's message on war aims which, in the words of an English journalist, was worth a dozen army corps and a regiment of angels to the democrats of Western Europe.

British labor also entered the new year with freshly girded strength. Nothing would have been worse than for the British people to have come into the weeks of strain throughout the spring and early summer of 1918 with the purposes of the war as fogged as they had been the year preceding. It is not too much to say that, while the bloody gains of the German drive in France were strengthening the grip of the Prussian imperialists upon Germany, the British labor offensive proved a counter force for coherence and endurance at home. In its own statement of war aims and in the statement it elicited from the British government, at the close of 1917, it gave the common people afresh the democratic issues that had fired them in those earlier days of trial in 1914. So doing, like the American president, British labor gave them to the common people of all the Allies.

Meeting in London in February, 1918, representatives of labor and socialist groups in England, France, Italy and Belgium (Rumanian, South Slav and South African delegations sitting in) accepted in substance the war aims put out by British labor in December; called on socialist and labor groups in the central powers to match this declaration; projected a consultative conference with them while the war was on if the conditions laid down were met; endorsed plans for an international labor conference to sit concurrently with the official peace conference whenever held; and called for a labor representative on each national delegation to the latter.

Thus, the early winter months of 1917-18, which marked the turn of the tide in Allied unity in waging war and in democratic statesmanship, witnessed three steps in the deliberate execution of the British labor offensive.

Their first step was to get unanimity on war aims among the labor bodies of Great Britain; their second to bank up majority and minority labor groups among the Allies behind a common program; their third to outflank the trench deadlocks and diplomatic inhibitions that for four years had isolated the working classes of Europe, and to get their conception of an unimperialistic settlement before the workers of the Central Empires. In so doing they sought to find out for themselves first-hand whether or not they might help open a way to a peace which would not only be safe for democracy, but democracy's own.

The succeeding chapters in this section [Part I] will interpret

the slow crystallization of working class opinion in England first in the Labour Party and then in the Trades Union Congress which, in 1917, had led up to the first of these steps. Succeeding sections will interpret the later steps [Part II]; the deep-seated forces which impelled them in the political [Part III] and economic [Part IV] life of Great Britain; labor's share in the swift events of 1918, leading up to the armistice and the end of the war [Part V]; and the presage inherent in these things of British labor's part in the new epoch of reconstruction [Part VI].